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Are we, however, to make freedom and self-disposal exclusive
to Intellectual-Principle as engaged in its characteristic Act,
Intellectual-Principle unassociated, or do they belong also to
soul acting under that guidance and performing act of virtue?
If freedom is to be allowed to soul in its Act, it certainly
cannot be allowed in regard to issue, for we are not master of
events: if in regard to fine conduct and all inspired by
Intellectual-Principle, that may very well be freedom; but is the
freedom ours?
Because there is war, we perform some brave feat; how is that our
free act since had there been no war it could not have been
performed? So in all cases of fine conduct; there is always some
impinging event leading out our quality to show itself in this or
that act. And suppose virtue itself given the choice whether to
find occasion for its exercise- war evoking courage; wrong, so
that it may establish justice and good order; poverty that it may
show independence- or to remain inactive, everything going well,
it would choose the peace of inaction, nothing calling for its
intervention, just as a physician like Hippocrates would prefer
no one to stand in need of his skill.
If thus virtue whose manifestation requires action becomes
inevitably a collaborator under compulsion, how can it have
untrammelled self-disposal?
Should we, perhaps, distinguish between compulsion in the act and
freedom in the preceding will and reasoning?
But in setting freedom in those preceding functions, we imply
that virtue has a freedom and self-disposal apart from all act;
then we must state what is the reality of the self-disposal
attributed to virtue as state or disposition. Are we to put it
that virtue comes in to restore the disordered soul, taming
passions and appetites? In what sense, at that, can we hold our
goodness to be our own free act, our fine conduct to be
uncompelled? In that we will and adopt, in that this entry of
virtue prepares freedom and self-disposal, ending our slavery to
the masters we have been obeying. If then virtue is, as it were,
a second Intellectual-Principle, and heightens the soul to
Intellectual quality, then, once more, our freedom is found to
lie not in act but in Intellectual-Principle immune from act.
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